I got my first 0.08 BTC from the faucet. It was supposed to be 0.02 BTC, but there was a bug that made it send four times. Once I got my mining rig set up, like a week or two later, I sent it all back.

sgornick gave me a free Bitcoin for the free Dwolla dollar I got when I signed up there I think. It was either him or someone else running another promotional gig. I then bought $20 worth of Bitcoin from either him or someone else via Paypal, and then by the end of February 2011 I owned over $500 worth through Keefe and some other IRC #bitcoin-otc regulars.

A friend, in a demonstration of how I could make use of it. Shortly after that I started doing business with it, then the bubble happened and I started speculating with some of my profits and spending more time on the board.

It was june 2010,I was very excited by idea of decentralised p2p currency,I gave it a try and run the client on mining mode on my 1.66 Ghz CPU laptop.Just in one or two days I got earned 50 BTC.At that time in just few days I made 450 BTC but did not knew that in one year 1 BTC will be 30 $.I spent all at so cheap rates I dont even remember now.

I put some dollar bills I had left from a vacation to Nepal (I'm german and don't usually own dollar bills) into an envelope and sent that to some obscure address in Canada.

I totally didn't expect anything to happen and wrote them off until after about 2-3 weeks (before I had mined a bitcoin with my on-board nvidia at 3 MHhash/s), suddendly something like 17 bitcoins popped up in my client. Nice!

To be honest, I wanted to try out SR, but after researching the actual prices, it was cheaper to use Mr. Shadester who lives a few blocks away

It does take a bit to set up Dwolla, but honestly it's the only reliable 100% scam-free way to get bitcoins that I know of (I use bitfloor which works with Dwolla). Patience is a virtue... and then you can get stuff from SR with European prices... so much cheaper and safer than Mr. Shadester